On Guns and Mental Health: Feds Issue New Regulations

The Department of Health and Human Services has proposed new regulations meant to encourage states to feed mental-health records into the national gun background-check database.

HHS tipped its hand in April, with an advanced notice of proposed rule-making, and after receiving more than 2,000 comments from states, health professionals and others, the agency said it has tried to strike a balance between privacy and the need to keep weapons out of the hands of seriously mentally ill.

Federal gun laws prohibit dealers from selling guns to people deemed to be “mentally defective.” But few states have contributed the mental-health records needed to make that prohibition meaningful, in part because authorities fear that doing so may violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, a patient privacy law.

The proposed regulations clarify that certain entities are exempt from the law and can pass along mental-health records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which gun dealers query to make sure their customers are legally permitted to have a firearm.